Alexandria Engineering Journal (Oct 2024)
Credit card fraud detection using the brown bear optimization algorithm
Abstract
Fraud detection in banking systems is crucial for financial stability, customer protection, reputation management, and regulatory compliance. Machine Learning (ML) is vital in improving data analysis, real-time fraud detection, and developing fraud techniques by learning from data and adjusting detection strategies accordingly. Feature Selection (FS) is essential for enhancing fraud detection through ML to achieve optimal model accuracy. This is because it helps to eliminate the negative impact of redundant and irrelevant attributes. To enhance the accuracy of the given dataset, the researchers utilized multiple methods to determine the most fitting features. However, it is important to note that when implementing these methods on datasets with larger feature sizes, they may encounter issues with local optimality. Despite this, the researchers continue to work on improving the effectiveness of these methods. This study presents an effective methodology based on the Brown-Bear Optimization (BBO) algorithm to enhance the capacity to accurately identify financial CCF transactions by recognizing pertinent features. BBO has balanced capabilities to reduce dimensionality while enhancing classification accuracy. It is improved by adjusting the positions randomly to enhance exploration and exploitation capabilities, and then it is cloned into a binary variant named Binary BBOA (BBBOA). The Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-nearest Neighbor (k-NN), and Xgb-tree are the ML classifiers used with the suggested methodology. On the Australian credit dataset, the proposed methodology is compared with the basic BBOA and ten current optimizers, such as Binary African Vultures Optimization (BAVO), Binary Salp Swarm Algorithm (BSSA), Binary Atom Search Optimization (BASO), Binary Henry Gas Solubility Optimization (BHGSO), Binary Harris Hawks Optimization (BHHO), Binary Bat Algorithm (BBA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), Binary Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (BGOA), and Binary Sailfish Optimizer (BSFO). Regarding Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test (α=0.05), the superiority and effective consequence of the presented methodology are clear on the utilized dataset and got an accuracy of classification up to 91% in the utilized dataset combined with an attribute reduction length down to 67%. The proposed methodology is further validated using 10 benchmark datasets and outperformed its competitors in most utilized datasets regarding different performance measures. In the end, the proposed methodology is further validated using ten benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. It outperformed its competitors in most of the utilized datasets regarding different performance measures.
